Brain injury accounts for millions of injuries and thousands of deaths annually. Traumatic brain injury accounts for more than a million injuries each year in the United States alone. Brain injury also occurs in cases of subarachnoid hemorrhage which typically result from cerebral aneurysm but also may occur in connection with accidents and traumatic brain injury.
Treatment for brain injured patients must address the initial injury and the likely eventual onset of secondary ischemic brain injury. Secondary neurological injury may occur hours or even days after the initial injury. Commonly it is associated with post injury swelling of brain tissue within the confined space of the cranial cavity. It is therefore necessary to monitor various physiological parameters within brain tissue if secondary injury is to be predicted and possibly avoided or, when it occurs, most effectively treated.
The onset of secondary damage to brain tissue is difficult to predict. To address this difficulty simultaneous neuromonitoring of a number of predictive physiological parameters, termed multimodal monitoring, is used. Multimodal monitoring assesses and presents to the medical practitioner insight into the condition of the brain injured patient as indicated by the concurrent monitoring of several parameters. This facilitates the forecasting of secondary neurological injury and the treatment of brain injuries